Stuff I didn't see in Las Vegas

When I was a kid, say it might have been the early Pleistocene Era, we used to make toy phones out of 'tin' (really aluminum) cans by tying two of them together on a string. Maybe that's where Nokia got the inspiration for this: a 'remade' cell phone that's made entirely out of recycled materials, including aluminum 'upcycled' from used beverage cans. I'd bet they were thinking more about the future than the past. Thinking towards a time when it will matter what materials go into ubiquitous accessories like cell phones and when it will matter how these things are disposed of, and the impact of all that on things like, uh, climate change. Wait a minute. That's not the future at all. That's now.

Way to go, Nokia. And if you're looking for somebody to help you with the process of 'upcycling' used aluminum beverage containers, I can point you in the right direction.

Cars are consumer products too

Alcoa sent us to this show to find the bright shiny buzz in the latest generation of TVs, PCs, cell phones and other personal gadgets. But while we were heading in one direction, the CES thought of another: Cars. This year, one whole mammoth convention hall hummed and throbbed to the beat of booth after booth of pimped-out, amped-up super extreme car entertainment systems. And there, in the middle of it all, sporting a CES Best of Show award on its silver roof, sat a good Alcoa friend: The EcoJet, an advanced, earth friendly, turbine-powered (I'm not kidding) sports car built by the wizards at Jay Leno's Big Dog Garage. Alcoa and GM both kicked in to help on the project, so it sports some cool GM styling built on advanced Alcoa chassis work and some amazing forged Alcoa wheels.

What's the Jet doing at CES? Showing off a complete, full featured, integrated PC system that not only powers the dash instruments but lets the driver and passenger do email, voicemail, web browsing, audio and video -- pretty much anything you can do on a PC, while driving down I-5 under bio-diesel turbine power.

Click here for an interview from the show floor.

Click here for some background on Alcoa and the EcoJet

This guy has the coolest job in the world

On my way to dinner, hurrying through one of the vast halls of this immense show, I ran into Tyrell Kulin of Voodoo Computers. Voodoo is part of Hewlett-Packard, but you wouldn't know it by looking at Voodoo's booth -- or at their PCs. Voodoo is to HP what Shelby is to Ford. It's where the restraints come off and the design is all about performance without compromise. As you might imagine, Voodoo's booth was one big shooting gallery, where guys in sites blasted away at simulated monsters and supervillians alongside kids in studs and tattoos. The noise was deafening, but I got a chance to interview Tyrelle about their flagship machine, the Blackbird. Voodoo's choice for the chassis of this bad-boy tower PC is aluminum: 80 pounds of it. Why? Because it looks cool. It manages the heat thrown off by the Blackbird's overclocked quad-core Intel chip. And, because Voodoo cares, it recycles when and if an end of life should ever come for Blackbird.

Click here to hear the Blackbird story straight from Tyrelle.

Click here for another Voodoo video on an amazing GOLD PLATED aluminum PC they also had in the booth.

Bling's the thing

It's pretty easy to figure out where the PC style revolution came from. In 1998, Apple introduced the iMac, screaming for attention with its candy-Apple design, tangy fruit colors, and its promise that, with the power of the Internet, a really cool computer could deliver more than word processing docs and spreadsheets. Then in 2001 the iPod took things a step further, vaulting the personal gadget into the realm of wearable art.

Finally the left-brained PC world is meeting the computer-as-bling challenge. Bill Gates' CES keynote address last Sunday night featured, among other things, a 'Spotlight on PC Fashion for 2008' that featured a dozen high-style, high-concept designs. Viewers were treated to notebook PCs painted vermilion red and Barbados yellow; laptops disguised as high-end handbags or sporting Lamborghini trim; and PCs that hang demurely on the wall and double as flat-screen high-def TVs.

There were even some notebooks, like the knockout Dell XPS, that blend high style with function, lightness and durability (click here for a video demo).

Relative newcomer Asus seems to have based its whole PC market strategy on style statement, showing off a line of bold, crafted and smart-looking designs at CES.

And industry leaders like Sony are using a sophisicated portfolio of materials and stylings to offer PCs that cross the line between office workhorse and home entertainment system.

For us in the aluminum business, this revoloution in PC fashion means one thing: a similar revolution in materials. Ideas that companies like Alcoa have developed for other industries -- automotive, consumer packaging, aerospace, architecture, for example -- will play well in this environment.

Problems we've solved in the past for other industries, and research we're doing on today's challenges, make it easier for PC makers to find a solution that cuts costs, solves engineering problems and meets the demands of a growing and sophisticated consumer audience, all at the same time.

You can't be too thin

Flat screens are selling like hotcakes.

Having just arm-wrestled a state-of-the-art, 80-pound 40" flat screen HDTV onto the wall of the rumpus room back home in Pittsburgh, we can appreciate the thought that what's already miraculously thin might be even better if it were even thinner. The great minds in the consumer electronics world are thinking the same thing, and they have brought some amazing products to Las Vegas this week.

Panasonic (Matsushita) brought not only the world's biggest screen (see my previous post) but also one of the world's thinnest, still in prototype form. You can click here for a video clip.

Sony not only brought them, they're selling them too, although at $2500 for an 11-inch desktop screen, they won't be gracing the rumpus room in Pittsburgh for a while. Other leaders in the industry -- Sharp, Samsung and Hitachi -- are showing similar designs, on the order of an inch to 1.5 inches thick.

What makes these miracles possible in part is a sandwich of many materials inside the screen, including backplane materials like aluminum that manage heat, support backlighting systems and perform other functions. You can catch up on Alcoa's latest research in backplane metal technology here.

Hold the phone

OK, so we missed the Bill Gates keynote and PC fashion show. Our flight came in too late to get tickets (yes, it was an E-Ticket attraction). And anyway, the PC fashion show was apparently upstaged by Bill's retirement video parody. We'll find the winners on the show floor and share them with you tomorrow.

One thing for sure: this show, like the industry it showcases, is all about style. From Panasonic's monster 150" plasma display (the new world champ) to the hot new MOTORAZR2 V8 with its tiny silver Bluetooth headphone (see photo), tech gear is trying its darndest to look cool, and make its owners do the same. (click here for a video clip on how aluminum and other metals in the design give the phone its appeal.) It's sleek, it's sexy, and you don't have to knock down a wall to get it into your house.

Style in the gadget business is long overdue. These things started delivering more than spreadsheets and email long ago, and consumers (especially young ones) are counting on the form to follow the function.

Can it go too far? No such thing, not in Las Vegas. One of the most talked about toys in the show is a new leopard print Taser from Taser International. That's right, leopard print, with an MP3 player built into the hoster. Hot, hot hot.

America's next top (PC) model?

Coming up next month in Pittsburgh we have an event called the Cinderella Ball, where well-meaning and upscale parents donate a fortune to charity at an event that presents their 17-year-old daughters to society. Complete with its own Prince Charming, the Ball is described as the second oldest debutante event in America, and is upstaged only when the Steelers are in the Super Bowl.

But if you believe what you read in the Wall Street Journal, Cinderella may have met her match. This year's Consumer Electronics Show will feature a keynote by the charming Bill Gates complete with its own PC Fashion Show (truth!) with a panel of celebrity judges that includes Nigel Barker of "America's Next Top Model."

Spurred by the runaway success of Apple's aluminum-highlighted i-Everything, the PC (i.e., non-Apple) world is scrambling to catch up on the geek-fashionista front.

According to reports, we'll get to ogle pink, purple and green Dells, H-Ps and Lenovos, sporting the laptop equivalent of leopard-print pumps and bustiers. For inspiration, PC designers are citing influences that include Porsche, Lamborghini, the Batmobile and high-end living room furniture. (I'm not making this up.)

Will consumers go for it? I don't know about you, but in my house the geeks don't get to spend the big gadget money any more. My wife picked out the big screen TV, a stylish black Sony. My daughters sport the high-end phones -- in pink.

Prince Charming, it's midnight and your pumpkin is waiting. Cinderella is calling the shots.